McDoul and Doobie Wallace were standing there, grinning. Wallace was in a white hotel robe and McDoul was wearing slacks and a T-shirt.
“What the fuck … ?” said Karp. “What time is it?”
“Lovin’ time,” said Wallace. “Welcome to the fringe benefits of the N.B.A.”
“Um, not right now, guys,” Karp said, rising from the bed. He smiled politely at the giggling women.
“In that case,” said McDoul, “I was wondering if you could …” He made a flitting motion with his hand.
“Oh, sure,” said Karp, hiding his annoyance. He was no stranger to what big-time athletes do in the off hours; he had done his share. But he was grumpy at being tossed out of his own bed and irritated with himself at having failed to call Marlene.
He went down to the lobby to search out a phone and ran into Bernie Nadleman.
“Butch! I was just starting to look for you. Come and have a drink.”
“Bernie, I need to call home—”
“Just for a minute,” said the coach, grabbing at Karp’s arm. He led Karp into the hotel’s lounge, a dark place done up in mock colonial: artfully scarred wooden tables, brass lamps, and smudged portraits of eighteenth-century personages. The waiters didn’t wear wigs and knee breeches, but you could figure that the owners were considering it.
Nadleman steered Karp to a round table in the corner whose half-dozen seats were occupied by men of a characteristic type. Karp had met their clones before at booster rallies and sports award dinners, clustering importantly around every major center of professional and (as if there was a difference) high-end college athletics. They were often beefy and always loud. They demanded the best service and got the best seats and never waited on a line. They owned teams.
In fact, Karp observed, one of them owned the team he was on. Howard Chaney had been vigorously celebrating the victory of his boys, and his broad face was flushed with drink. He hailed Nadleman heartily and grabbed his hand. He raised his glass in a clumsy toast, sloshing liquor on the table and his sleeve.
“Heyyy, Bernie!” he cried, “way to go, Coach! Fuckin’ Celtics, way to win ’em.” The power boys around the table bellowed agreement. Nadleman said, “Howie, this is Butch Karp. You said you wanted to …”
Chaney stared up at Karp for a moment before he recalled why Karp had a claim on his interest. “Oh, right. Hell of a shot, Karp.” To his friends: “Hey, guys, this guy just shot the second longest basket in N.B.A. history—fuckin’ amazing! You do that every game you can have my daughter.” Loud laughter. “Twice, you can have my wife.” More laughter. Chaney seemed to remember something and peered at Karp narrowly through the fumes of cigar smoke and booze. “Hey, guys, this is the fuckin’ D.A. I was telling you about! The boys kill anybody out there on the court, I guess you can take care of it, huh?”
Chaney beamed at his cronies, his hand extended palm out toward Karp, as if presenting for approval an unusually large bass. Everyone laughed, including, Karp was unhappy to see, Bernie. Karp allowed a tight smile to crease his face, nodded to the company, and began to pull away from Bernie’s steering hand.
“Hey, where you going, Butch? I thought we could have a drink.” They moved away from the power table, which ignored them.
“I’m tired, Bernie. I’m an old man, remember?”
“Just one, OK?”
Karp sighed and followed the coach to a booth. They ordered beers. Bernie grinned at him and said, “Old man, my ass! You were unbelievable out there tonight. I just wanted to tell you I was wrong. You turned the whole team around.”
Karp gave him a sour look. “Bernie, I did not turn the team around. What I did was I heaved a high pass that went in by a fluke. What turned the team around was that Doobie started passing and moving without the ball. He had more assists tonight than he’s had all season. Why he should start now, I don’t know, but there it is.”
Nadleman smiled and shook his head. “You were great.”
“Yes, I was great. I’m a good point guard. But Bryan is a good point guard too, minus his attitude, which by the way might improve if you yanked him occasionally and put in Murphy or McDoul when he gets up to his tricks. The thing is, I’m a good point guard for ten minutes. There’s no way I can do consistently what I did tonight.” He indicated his knee. “It won’t take the pounding. And besides, we shouldn’t forget why I’m really here.”
“Oh, that.” Nadleman’s face darkened and he took a chug of his beer. “So. You learn anything?”
“Some. You ever hear of a guy named Thelmann? Works out of the Queens D.A.”
“Yeah, I think I met him once, just after Marion got killed. Short little guy?”
“Yeah. Does Chaney know him?”
Nadleman shrugged. “I don’t know. He could. Why?”
“Because I saw Thelmann last week and he gave me a line about not fucking with the Simmons case because it was part of a big citywide investigation that was coming to a head. And later, outside the courthouse, I saw him getting into a car with Chaney.”
Nadleman’s jaw dropped. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. So what’s the story? Is Chaney into something with the Queens D.A.?”
“Christ, Butch! It’s hard to believe. The last time I suggested that he use some of his clout with the City to get more action on it, he went ballistic on me.”
Karp thought of the argument he had overheard on the night of his first practice. He said, “Well, who knows? Maybe it was something else.”
They finished their beers, making desultory small talk, and Karp went back to his room, where he found McDoul in bed reading his real estate book.
“I see the party’s over,” said Karp.
“Yeah, they’re down with Doobie now. Man, that mother never gets enough.”
“Well, I hope you didn’t use my bed.” Karp sat and picked up the phone, then paused. “Fill me in here. The whole team indulges in these parties?”
McDoul snorted. “No, Blanding’s a churchgoer. Kravic’s just married. Some guys got regular girls in this town or that.”
“How about Marion?”
“Marion?” McDoul’s brow knotted. “Well, he hung with Doobie and Jamesie pretty much, and those two were basically the team’s crotch commission. But the last couple of months he dropped out.”
“He had a girl?”
“That’s the story. Doobie saw him outside a club with this incredible fox, a blonde, and we started to rag him on it, you know? And he wouldn’t bite. Like, one time, in Atlanta I think it was, we got us a couple of chicken buckets, and Doobie says, ‘Hey, save the white meat for Simmons. That’s what he likes.’ Some shit like that, and Marion gets real pissed and walks out. So we left off of him after that.”
“Uh-huh. She have a name, this girl?”
“I never heard it. He wouldn’t talk about it. The rumor mill says she was married, but I can’t vouch for that. How come you’re so interested?”
“I’m not. Just bullshitting. But I hear Simmons was a hell of a ball player.”
“You hear right, son. And it wasn’t just his talent. I mean, the girl—it’s fucking amazing he had anything left to prong a chick. Like, we all joke—‘basketball is my life’—but it was true on Marion. Hey, I dig the game and all, but Marion could be a little boring on the subject, if you want to know.”
“Not as interesting as real estate.”
McDoul chuckled and looked at his book. “Yeah. But the difference is, when your legs go, real estate don’t give a good goddamn.”
CHAPTER NINE
“It’s me,” Karp said. “Is it too late?”
“No, I’ve just had a bath, and then Jim Raney dropped by.”
“Oh?”
“Oh me no ‘oh’s’ in that tone of voice, my boy,” said Marlene. “He was over at Pete’s and did me the favor of dropping off the funeral photos.”
“So he didn’t join you in the bath?”
“No, I just stuck my creamy butt out and we did it f
ast dog-style in the doorway, like always. How about you? I heard about you big-time pro stars. Getting any?”
“No, but everybody else is and it’s making me horny. What’s this about the funeral pictures? I assume you talked to Bello.”
Marlene told her story, focusing on the discovery of John Doone and Bello’s doubts about Doone’s involvement in the murder, and about the unidentified trio. “So that’s that,” she concluded. “The obvious next steps would be to talk to Doone, talk to Leona, and run a serious check on the livery companies, but I obviously can’t do that without Balducci and Bello, and besides, there’s your famous secret investigation—”
“It’s not mine, dear,” said Karp, “and whether it’s Jerry Thelmann’s or not remains to be seen. But for your information, I think I found your blonde.”
“No kidding! Who?”
“No name yet, but the word is, Marion was seeing a white woman, blonde, possibly married.”
“Hmmm, enter a host of additional motives, from a jealous husband to the K.K.K. Of course, that doesn’t explain the coke.”
“Unless the husband is a coke dealer named Bubbah Jim Bob. Look, we can’t do anything right now. I’ll be back on Thursday. I’ll show the pictures to a few people, maybe get a confirmation on the girl. I also want to see whether we can pin down where Marion went on the night of. I looked it up, and it was a game night. He might have told someone where he was going.
“The weirdest part is, I’m not tripping over anyone. I’ve talked to one or two people on the team, and kept my ears open; Marion’s still a subject of conversation. Nobody has talked to these people. If Bello is just a distraction, where’s the real investigation?”
“Maybe Chaney is the only one in on it.”
“Um, yeah, but you haven’t met Chaney. He drinks and gets drunk. He pals with a bunch of guys who look like they get around. He’s the last person I’d use in a confidential investigation, unless he’s an actual eyewitness to the murder, in which case, why haven’t they arrested someone? It doesn’t make sense, and it’s starting to piss me off. This sucks, even for Queens.”
“And what should I do meanwhile?”
Karp was about to say, “Gestate,” but stopped himself in time. Instead he said, “Use your imagination, anything you can dig up, but, um, avoid anything official. If Thelmann is running some game, I’d rather he didn’t hear about it. If he’s kosher, we’d be in serious shit.”
“ ‘Use your imagination’! Gosh, what confidence in little wifey! This is a change. It must be true love at last. Mmm—my nipples are stiffening with desire, my lush thighs slide together under the sheer silk of my kimono. Tiny droplets of love juice start to pearl on the matchless coral of my nether lips …”
“Good night, Marlene,” said Karp.
The next morning Marlene was up early and feeling perkier than she had in weeks. She slipped into her kimono and after breakfasting on a large pot of tarry Medaglia D’Oro and a square of warmed-up Sicilian anchovy pizza, attacked her home with energy. She made the bed, swept and damp-mopped the entire loft, dusted surfaces that seemed to need it, gathered and filed the funeral pictures from the night before, pinning the blow-up of the mystery trio to the corkboard next to the refrigerator, wiped down the stove, watered the plants, left out cat food on the fire escape for her wandering cats, sorted and bagged the week’s laundry, collected the trash in plastic bags, and then, having worked up a fine sweat, lay down on a mat in the middle of the floor to do her Lamaze natural childbirth exercises.
You were, of course, supposed to have The Father there to coach you along; the line drawings in her book showed a generic husband being a perfect modern man. Karp was, however, not a perfect modern man, which, all things considered, suited Marlene pretty well. He was willing to do the necessary, but she could see his heart was not in it.
Nor was hers. Her image of an appropriate accouchement involved grave elderly Sicilian ladies (in rustling black with jet ornaments and cameo pins), steaming caldrons, secret herbal drinks, and herself on a brass bed, gripping the bars, screaming curses at God and men, while the ladies crossed themselves and gave conflicting advice. The men, of course, would be out in the yard with the other animals, smoking yellow cigarettes and discussing politics and extortion. That was childbirth.
Nevertheless … she puffed and panted, counting appropriately, for twenty minutes, then arose and turned to a more interesting sort of practice. Marlene had been introduced to sleight-of-hand by a physical therapist several years back, when a letter bomb had damaged her hands, especially the left one, which lacked the ends of the two smallest fingers. She had worked at it diligently during her therapy, then dropped it, and had recently taken it up again, thinking that she could delight little children at birthday parties with magic tricks, and thus become a more nearly perfect mom for little whomever.
She also found it marvelously relaxing, this endless repetition of finger moves, like a drug that shut off the worrying centers of the brain. You couldn’t look at your hands; that was the key, except in the mirror, when you had the trick down; it had to be unconscious action, like Zen archery.
Marlene sat at the dining room table with a small tinfoil ball, a steel thimble, and a nickel laid out before her, facing a framed mirror propped up by a couple of bricks. She took the ball and practiced French drops, seeming to grab the ball out of one hand with the other, but actually palming it. Then she ran through a sequence of top-of-fist and bottom-of-fist vanishes, then fingertip productions, where the ball appears at the fingertips out of the seemingly empty hand, and finally, the more difficult ball acquitments, where the artist seems to show the audience that there is no ball in either hand. Done properly, the illusion is startling: the audience swears that it saw both hands exposed and empty simultaneously.
Then she did palms, switches and the standard vanishes with both coin and thimble, ending with the thimble walking from thumb to pinkie on her good hand and back again. Not ready for Vegas, Marlene thought, but it should baffle a four-year-old.
Now she found, as often before, that the blank concentration of the sleight-of-hand session had been a fertile void. She walked down to her desk, a beat-up wooden office model, three-quarters covered with houseplants, and pulled out the file where she kept the things Balducci had given her and her notes on the Simmons case.
Reading them through again, she wrote rapidly on a legal pad, putting down ideas, crossing them off, substituting others. Then she took a fresh sheet and condensed the rambling notes into a few terse lines:
1. Where was he killed? Where did he go after game? (Butch)
2. Girl, cars—check limos. (Bello)
3. Drugs—Doone (? hold off)
4. Sister (A.S.)
Satisfied with this effort, she put the rest of the files away, and after checking numbers in her little address book, she dialed Bello’s office. He was not there, and she left a message. Then she dialed the number Ariadne Stupenagel had given her. It was a service, and she left her name there too.
So much for crime. She put on slippers and belted her kimono tighter and began to climb down the ladder to Stuart Franciosa’s loft, as she had every Karp-less morning since Stu had started his sculpture.
The phone rang. She ignored it, and continued down.
“I’m here for my immortalization,” she said as she entered the loft. “You better hurry it up if you want to capture the noble swell of my labonza.”
Franciosa smiled at her from behind the low bench where he worked on jewelry. He had a set of magnifiers strapped to his head and was working with concentration on some glittering object.
“Come over and check this out. Want some coffee?”
“No, I had already. What is it? Wow, that’s pretty!”
He placed the object in her hand. It was a thick medallion, done in massive gold with silver inlays, of a beautiful boy’s face in high relief. His curls, the angelic mouth, the flared nostrils, were all done in remarkable detail, and though derived
from the kouros portraits found on Hellenistic coins, it was a modern face, the kind you saw getting off the bus at Port Authority every day. “OK, now press in on the nose,” said the sculptor. Marlene did so and the face folded in on itself with a click. She was now holding in her hand a perfectly modeled set of male genitalia, the penis erect.
“Stu, this is amazing,” she shrieked, and laughed so hard the baby started kicking. “You made this? I love it! How do you make it go back to the face?”
“Put it in your mouth and slowly run your tongue … no, I lied—you push down on the tip of the prick.”
“Gosh, I was taught as a girl never to do that.”
“Me too, but that’s how it works,” said Franciosa. Marlene pushed and the face reassembled itself. “I have to have this,” she said.
“Well, it’s a pricey item, but we could talk about a deal. This is the Mark I version, actually—”
“Mark who? Do I know him?”
“Shh! It’s got some flaws that I’ve worked out for the model I’m going to market. You can have it for the price of the metal; I was going to give you something for modeling anyway.” He named a figure and Marlene readily agreed.
“OK, put it down and let’s get to work,” said Franciosa, walking over to where the statue lay under its damp sheet. Marlene dropped her robe and assumed the familiar position; Franciosa lifted off the sheet and picked up a glittering instrument.
The glitter caught Marlene’s eye. “What’s that you’re using on it?”
“Don’t move your head, please. It’s a curette, as a matter of fact. Larry brings home all sorts of goodies from the hospital. A lot of them are useful to me—curettes, probes, hemostats. Lift your chin a bit. Good. Theft, I guess, but I think it’s entirely innocent. You know Larry—absentminded as a clam. He shoves them in his pockets and walks out with them. If the sculpting business ever collapses, we can open a hospital.”
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